This conversation between Stanley
Kunitz and Mark Katzman took place on February 28, 2003, at the Digital
Library at the American Museum of Natural History.

What does one learn working in a garden?

SK: Patience above all, patience. And beyond patience
one learns to appreciate the beauty of ordinary things in this earth and
the magic of growth and survival.

What’s the role of poetry in our culture?

SK: I think the role of poetry in culture is to make
us all aware of the richness of experience itself, of the possibilities
of examining, studying, and loving all the bearers of life through all
the orders of creation. I believe very strongly in the web of creation.
I think we are all part of it and if we disturb it at any one point, the
whole web trembles.

I know you're the moving force behind the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown
as well as Poets House here in New York. What motivated you to put these
organizations together?

SK: What propelled me is the experience of my own self
as a young man in a world that I felt was unresponsive and neglectful
and that above all I felt was alienated from the aspirations of the young
and paid little attention to them. I know how much I hungered for companionship
and for a supporting word and I resolved that if I was ever in a position
to help the young and lost in the world of the arts I would do something
about it.

Can poetry be taught?

SK: It cannot be taught to the unresponsive, the uncaring,
the unsympathetic heart, mind and soul, but it certainly can be taught,
or at least communicated to those who are hungry for the word and who
need some sense of destiny and direction.

How was your experience as a Poet Laureate?

SK: What pleased me most was the communication from
people who are not poets-- housewives, merchants, young people in school
looking toward the future. Those letters were so touching, so real, that
I felt it was an answer to those who think of poetry as somehow peripheral
of art in the modern world. It is not so; it strikes at the center of
human experience. I think that poetry is the voice that can be heard if
we listen to it, generation after generation. It's the cry and the song
of the human spirit through the centuries and no art has been so expressive
of it as poetry.